Steve Ellner's Blog on Venezuela, Latin America and Beyond

The centralization of ownership of the private media in the United States and elsewhere has become increasingly pronounced, at the same time that its reporting has become increasingly one-sided and monolithic. My blog seeks to expose this lack of objectivity and present alternative ideas that point in the direction of much-needed fundamental change.

Tuesday, April 18, 2017

WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF THE VENEZUELAN OPPOSITION PROTESTS REACH DOWNTOWN CARACAS?

All the opposition marches in April
called by Henrique Capriles and other Venezuelan leaders of the MUD have sought
to reach downtown Caracas. The ostensible goal is to present a petition to the
Defensoria del Pueblo. In a normal situation, such a mobilization would
certainly be legitimate. But opposition leaders fully realize that the
government will not allow for the protesters to march from the wealthy eastern
part of Caracas to the downtown area. There are echoes of the April 11, 2002
march that led into the coup against President Chávez, when the opposition
newspaper El Nacional published the large banner headline “The Final Battle in
Miraflores,” encouraging people that day to march to the presidential palace.

Let us assume that the Maduro
government, acting in good faith, were to allow the opposition protesters to
march to the center of Caracas. Such a scenario would go something like this:

Scenario one: The Maduro government
meets with opposition leaders and grants them permission to march to the center
of Caracas. The opposition agrees to limit the march to 35,000 people and to
end the protest in the late afternoon.

Scenario two: Peaceful march to the
center of Caracas. Everything goes according to plan.

Scenario three: Opposition leaders
such as Freddy Guervara (as he has said in the past) announces that the
opposition will remain in the center of Caracas until their demands are met.
The less extremist leaders such as Capriles now call on their followers to join
the protest and people come in from the eastern part of Caracas, from the
eastern part of Venezuela and from the west as far away as Táchira, Mérida and
Maracaibo. There are now 750,000 protesters in the center of Caracas.

Scenario four: At nighttime, the
guarimba brigades, which during the 2014 protests were responsible for
widespread destruction and violence and have acted in a similar way in recent
days, go on a rampage and clash with national guardsmen and police.

Scenario five: CNN and other
international news outlets juxtapose the confrontation of the guarimba brigades
with security forces, on the one hand, and the peaceful protesters, on the
other, thus leaving the impression that the government is using random force
against peaceful protesters.

Scenario six: At this point Maduro
may see the handwriting on the wall in which case he resigns. If he doesn’t, we
can all imagine scenarios seven, eight and nine.

Sunday, April 9, 2017

U.S. ATTACK ON SYRIA’S AIRBASE SHEDS LIGHT ON THE IDEOLOGICAL DIVIDE IN U.S. POLITICS

The
positive response of Democratic Party centrists and the corporate media, in
toto, to the attack on Syria’s Shayrat airbase sheds light on an important ideological
divide in U.S. politics. Progressives, as opposed to centrists, condemned the
attack in no uncertain terms. I do not belittle the importance of some of the
reforms proposed by Democratic centrists (the Clintons, Obama, etc.) on the
domestic front in the area of health, regulation of the private sector, etc,
even while these measures do not represent real solutions to urgent problems
(the centrists, for instance, do not support single-payer or complete
elimination of fracking). But I have always felt that foreign policy is more
important than domestic issues. Firstly, because military spending saps up at
least fifty percent of the federal budget. And second, from a humanitarian
viewpoint in that so many lives are at stake. As can be seen in the case of the
conflict in Syria, there is much more of a consensus between Democratic and
Republican Party leaderships on foreign issues than domestic ones.

The
Democratic centrists are now in a quandary. Up until now they have tried, and
with considerable success, to retain the support of those who are infuriated
with Trump’s positions and policies. This was especially important because the
Resistance movement takes in a considerable number of rank-and-file Democrats,
some of whom supported Hillary in the primaries.

The
attack on Shayrat may represent a milestone in U.S. politics. An independent
progressive pole that attracts those who most staunchly reject Trumpism will be
deprived of resources and other types of backing from the Democratic Party establishment
and the mainstream media. But in the long run, it will be able to highlight foreign
policy issues, specifically the issue of militarism and interventionism, which for
so long was submerged or shunted aside. If this happens, U.S. politics will be
reshaped in a fundamental way, and for the better.

About Me

Steve Ellner has taught economic history at the Universidad de Oriente in Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela since 1977. He is the author of numerous books and journal and magazine articles on Venezuela history and politics. He frequently lectures on Venezuela and Latin American political developments in the U.S. and elsewhere. He received his Ph.D. in Latin American history at the University of New Mexico in 1980.